The need for
continuous improvement is desired in every tiny little part of our
fast-growing society. There’s no doubt about that. Researching all
kinds of stuff in all kinds of industries and looking for the latest
developments, trends, hot topics and issues is part of my job and you
would believe what are the most common words or phrases to be found:
improvement, best practices in
this and that, finding
more sufficient ways of...,
strengthening processes and many more of a
similar nature. It's logical and it would be irrational to do the
opposite. We all have to improve continuously to keep up with the
world.
I have come across
many blog posts and white papers and one of them recently caught my
attention. Despite it having seven full pages of reading, I did read
it (seven is not that high a number of pages, but to be honest I do
not enjoy wasting my working time on reading this kind of stuff – I
have better things to do to be efficient and productive). The paper
was conducted by Norway Statistics
(translation from Norwegian Statistisk sentralbyrå),
Norway's central institution for producing official statistics, and
the topic of the paper is The Improvement of
HR Management by using
Lean. Finally, a white paper from which I
understood the basic principles of Lean and how it could be adapted
to HR!
The authors of the
paper identify
and
explain
the
basic
problems
for
the
HR
department
which
necessitated
the
change and why
they decided to use the Lean approach, what was expected to be
changed and how. All of these issues, problems, needs and
explanations made me
think about the whole idea of transforming the structure of a
department or a whole company (when it comes to reorganization). As
I
have
already
mentioned
a
few
times,
never-ending
change
is
necessary
and
everything
needs
to
be
'up-to-date',
but
why
tend
to
do
the
same
things
over
and
over
again? First, we
try to decentralize the management and divide the tasks among the
people and offices, then, because new trends are saying so,
everything is centralized again because it was not efficient; after
some time it now seems to not be efficient enough... and so it
goes... Even when our structure works perfectly!
Anyways, after reading the insights of
professionals from Norway Statistics I realized that we will never be
satisfied with anything and we will never admit failure of the
transformation of some department after we have put so much effort
into it. BUT, the lean approach has been successful in every area
where it has been introduced and I believe that HR should also
discover its benefits.
Join our webinar about HR Lean Management and learn more!
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